The Wizard of Id: Harry Langdon

Posted by on 04/18/2026 No comments
Harry Langdon carries a crude female mannequin down a ladder, saving her from a fire.
Harry Langdon, “Heart Trouble” (1928)

Not enough people know about Harry Langdon, considered one of the “Big 4” silent film comedians (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon). He’s utterly bizarre and far less accessible than his contemporaries, to the point where he has become the subject of post-modern interpretation and trans analysis.

Lorenzo Tremarelli, in Film Theory, describes Langdon as “creating a semiotic void”, who “detaches the signifier from its expected signified”. He does this by flouting the contemporary film tropes, for example he is known for using an extended pause in reaction shots of his face. “This is the brilliance of his prolonged stare: he provides the signifier (his face) but refuses to provide the signified (the emotion), forcing the audience into a state of semiotic crisis.” (Lorenzo Tremarelli, Film Theory, March 6, 2026“).

I think this is absolutely correct. A lot of my writing is about the unspoken conventions of film, and how they enforce a version of the world that upholds the social contract, while purporting to free the audience from the drudgery of everyday life (Hollywood Dream Factory). I’ve discussed this in the context of horror films, how they would simply be unwatchable without the filmic touches that soften the awful acts central to their plots. I’ve talked about it in terms of phony dialog: quippy , or overly expository. I’ve maintained that the crude semiotics of silent films (Keystone Kops, Perils of Pauline) offer a greater freedom for actors and directors to be creative deviate, compared to the seamless baked-in assimilated norms of modern movies, which become harder and harder to identify.

Examples: Chaplin kissing Jackie Coogan on the mouth in “The Kid”. The convention is love for children, Chaplin made it reverential (having just lost his own child) rather than “referential”, which could be something like the adult character calling the child “buddy” and high-fiving them, which references sentiment without showing it).

Also Garbo cradling John Garfield’s head and stroking his hair in “Flesh and the Devil”.

Greta Garbo strokes John Garfield's hair, his head on her lap.
Flesh and the Devil (1926)

This is a liminal act, casual, between passion and conversation.

But Langdon’s transgressions are less charming. Ella Tucan in her “One Movie Blog” describes him as “the most helpless, immature, sexless, timid and downright stupid of all the silent clowns” and “a middle-aged baby” (Harry Langdon: The Elderly Baby, March 15, 2014). This wasn’t accidental and it wasn’t because Harry Langdon, the performer, was stupid. He fired Frank Capra, the director of his most popular movies, because of Capra’s crowd-pleasing sensibilities (Pauline Kael described this as “Capri-corn”). He was a seasoned and popular vaudeville star.

Beyond his Lacanian anti-Otherness, Langdon presented a barely-repressed Id. an organism’s “basic instinctual drives that are present at birth…. governed only by the pleasure principle”. Let’s use the example of one of Langdon’s first hits “Tramp Tramp Tramp”. It’s a straight up “get the girl” redemption story. Bumbling son Harry wins cross-country race to save his family business, and gets the hand of an early Joan Crawford, no less. Yet in the final scene, which seems utterly separate from the rest of the film, Harry and Joan look in on their new baby infant, and the audience is presented with this:

Harry
“Tramp Tramp Tramp” (1926)

A full-grown Harry Langdon, frolicking in a bassinet with a baby bonnet on his head. Gumming a teddy bear and a ball, then suckling on a baby bottle with a long tube that evokes an enema bottle. He thumbs his nose at Capra’s pieties.

Ella Tucan describes him as “a combination of clown, infant, and hermaphrodite”. He is conventional masculinity’s worst nightmare: hapless, confused, vacant, seemingly gender-fluid. In “The Chaser” one of his self-directed films, he switches roles with his wife, and ends up being forcibly kissed by various deliverymen.

Harry Langdon in a dress

At the slightest sign of stress his fingers find his mouth.

Unlike Harold Lloyd, he is not trying to improve himself. He is a non-conforming naif, yet in his Capra movies he always gets the girl. He’s often described as a dope but to me there is a self-awareness, a decision to be this way. This distinguishes him from Stan Laurel, with whom he’s often compared (the two were friendly), who is an innocent fool.

Pauline Kael quotes James Agee as saying Langdon looks “”as if he wore diapers under his pants.” I think there is an aggression in this, just as there is an aggression in clowning. His refuses to reassure, to engage in normative male behavior. Keaton, Chaplin and Lloyd were always following the script of self-improvement. Langdon, the true clown, looks as if he would just as soon shit himself, put on a dress, and suck on a baby bottle.


The 525,600 minutes of Dr. T

Posted by on 04/18/2026 No comments
Long shot of expressionistic bare Suessian movie set.

Busby-Berkely meets Emerald City meets Alice in Wonderland meets Kafka’s “The Trial”. Story, lyrics and screenplay by Dr. Seuss. Originally created in 1953, just 8 years after the end of WWII. The sets are expressionistic, weird, Seussian. The acting is banal, that stylized “Leave it to Beaver” cadence: “Listen here Mr. Zabladowski, you may be the very best plumber in town, but when it comes to piano lessons I hardly think you qualify as an expert!” I suppose this is meant to be witty but nobody talks like this.

Peter Lind Hayes plays Mr. Zablodowski, a plumber who gets pulled into the drama and becomes a father figure to the main character, Bart Collins, played by child actor and Lassie star Tommy Rettig. Hayes’ low-energy vibe is decribed in Michael’s Moviepalace as “drab and passive, giving us no confidence in his skills as a hero, a father figure, or even as a plumber.”

In direct contrast to the languid nightmare that is the rest of the movie is this remarkable freak and breath of fresh air, Hans Conried:

Hans Conreid as the maniacal conductor wearing a striped shirt with a pink embroidered bass clef on it.

He brings the zany full force. There are 11 musical numbers, cut down from an original of 20. Conried describes the audience at the Hollywood premiere of the original version ” “At the end there was only one boy left and he was waiting for his mother to pick him up” (Wikipedia). Apparently the original cut has been lost.

There are some fun touches, the chorus of green-painted zombie musicians are amusing.

Fantastical orchestra along stone steps of dungeon playing stylized horns.

The henchmen remind me of those on the old Batman tv show, bumbling oafs:

Henchmen in yellow and blue outfits with yellow and blue skullcaps. Yellow outfit means blue skullcap and vice versa.
Screenshot

I suppose it would be too terrifying without the comic element, although there is a disturbing scene in a dungeon where a percussionist who played an extra bass drum hit is imprisoned in a bass drum that is being played foreverL

Dungeon scene of shadow of man trapped in a giant bass drum.
Screenshot

With movies like this I wonder did no one look at it and say “We have five different types of films here that are all somewhat bad and don’t work together?” I like the ambition, the fantasy, the anti-fascist themes, the creativity, but it this one was hard to sit through.

Lost in Search of Time

Posted by on 09/23/2025 1 comment
Book cover of the book "Don't Sleep, there are Snakes", a tribesman and child

What can the Pirahã hunter-gatherers of the Amazon rainforest teach us about the modern doomscrolling epidemic? According to Daniel Everett, the author of “Don’t Sleep, there are Snakes” they live happy lives, focused on immediate experience, with little concept of past and future. They don’t subscribe to the concept of time as a scarce resource to be managed and measured, prevalent only since the invention of mechanical clocks in the 13th century.

Everett is a Christian missionary who moves his family to Brazil and lives with the Pirahã in order to learn their language, and to convert them to Christianity.

Learning the Pirahã language proves to be difficult, with its absence of “recursive structures”. Recursion is the embedding of a clauses within a clause, for example “The man, who is fishing, is my brother.” Without recursion this would be expressed as a series of clauses: “The man is fishing. The man is my brother”. This finding was controversial and goes against Noam Chomsky’s assertion that recursion is universal.

Everett experiences the Pirahã as living in a very present-focused way. They don’t have stories of legends past, and don’t speculate about the future. Everett fails miserably at converting them to Christianity – despite his valiant efforts creating recording summary of the Gospels the Pirahã’s own language. When they find his audiotape boring (except for a graphic telling of John the Baptist’s beheading), Everett re-records the summary this time narrated by a native tribesman, however this also fails.

The Pirahã simply have no trust and little interest in information that is not directly observed. They ask Everett about Jesus:

“Did you see him?” Did your father see him?” when the answer is no, they tune out. Eventually Everett ends up abandoning his faith, the Pirahã convert him. Exposed to a well-adjusted, happy people who do not rely on the far-removed promises and laws of the Bible, he changes his world view.

What does this have to do with doomscrolling? People who scroll endlessly in search of dopamine describe losing the sense of time passing. They experience intermittent reinforcement, a type of reward frequency that makes a behavior more resistant to extinction. This is not always healthy, and it’s not my contention that it is.

Humans have for 300,000 years lived in a present-focused way, whereas the practice of dividing time into distinct units (to be used productively) is ridiculously recent. Our predisposition toward activities which return one to an instinctive sense of present may evolutionary bias. Doomscrolling provides relaxation from the mental ligatures of time-management.

Thus the appeal of doomscrolling is not just the dopamine hit from entertaining content, delivered intermittently, it’s also a larger sense of being given an ancestral reprieve from the modern tyranny of time.

Chaplin: Sentimental Education

Posted by on 08/05/2025 Comments Off on Chaplin: Sentimental Education

I had Chaplin all wrong, I was too influenced by his personal life and the commercialization of his image. In fact, my conception was more of people imitating “The Tramp” with the weird duck-walk and twitchy mustache, than of him in films. It’s in some of his early comedies that you see the self-sacrificing noble qualities that are less often considered.

Example A: The tenderness he shared with Jackie Coogan in “The Kid” (1921):

Chaplin hugging Jackie Coogan

Shortly before filming Chaplin and his wife had a child who died a few days after birth. Chaplin then poured himself into the production. There is a scene where he is reunited with “The Kid” that includes a full-mouth kiss that is unlike anything I’ve seen in movies.

chaplin kissing "The Kid" jackie coogan

May and Nichols

Posted by on 07/22/2024 Comments Off on May and Nichols

When I see video clips of Nichols and May, I get the sense that comedy can be redeemed from it’s current state of hysterical impersonal caricature by returning to the craft of acting.

Elaine May and Mike Nichols were Method-trained actors. Their improvisational sketches are effective because their acting is so good. In the famous “Mother and Son” sketch, despite the hilarious quips, you get a feeling that Elaine May’s mother is both hurt AND manipulative. It’s a richer portrayal than the “I’m the crazy guy! Look how crazy I am!” monotone style of sketch comedy you see on SNL these days. There are actual stakes, it’s relatable.

Go clean your room!

Posted by on 01/31/2024 Comments Off on Go clean your room!

Admonishment as curative in “Dopamine Nation”

This was definitely a “No Malarky” type of read.

Anna Lembke seems compassionate but limits herself to dispensing the kind of old-fashioned advice you might get from George Will. Just stop doing the bad thing! Throw out anything that helps you do the bad thing! Now experience some sort of discomfort to reset your dopamine. Be honest with people about all the bad things you do.

It’s sort of like “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, which basically just says “Be Effective”. Or Jordan Peterson saying “Clean up your room!”. We are in an era of dopamine-seeking dysfunction. But the book’s solution on how to fix this seems limited to personal responsibility. Not much on how well that actually works. Does AA work? The organization says 75% of adherents remain abstinent, other studies put it at more like 30%.

I would have liked to read suggestions at the societal level, and also a better ranking of which actions at a personal level have the most science-backed effectiveness and durability.

“A Christmas Carol” – Prioritizing threat-associated sensory information

Posted by on 01/22/2024 3 comments

I recently saw a local musical adaptation of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” (“A Ghost Story of Christmas”) in which Scrooge seemed to magically change from a curmudgeon into jocund benefactor. It seemed abrupt and unearned, so I returned to the novel to try to figure out what specifically changed him.

Scrooge is someone who lives in scarcity, he prides himself on being impervious to any creature comforts: “

“External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm nor wintry weather chill him”……”Foul weather didn’t know where to have him.”
(“A Christmas Carol”, Dickens, chapter 1)

Three spirits visit Scrooge. I thought the first, The Ghost of Christmas Past, would be the main catalyst, since it show’s Scrooge as a sad abandoned boy, eventually welcomed back into the family. Victorian-era PTSD.

Everyone (except me) loves the Ghost of Christmas Present, with all the food porn and grocer’s shop porn. Also everyone super-merry, hyper-merry, maniacally-merry, especially the poor. I’m sure that in the 1840’s this part of the book would be read and reread, but I found it unrealistic. I think Victorian England was going through a “Christmas Boom” at the time, it reads as aspirational and forced to me. Contrast this section with the early scalpel like description of Scrooge. “Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster.”

This comparison with an oyster reminded me of The Book of Job, where Job describes his degraded state in terms of other creatures: “I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.”

It’s the last Spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Future, that causes Scrooge to change. How sobering would it be to hear estate robbers brag about stealing the bed-curtains off of your deathbed, as you lay dying in it? Dark! The only people who express any emotion at your death are people who are happy you died because they owed you money. And finally seeing your own neglected gravestone.

Dickens was tying into human’s “attentional threat bias”, a gift from evolution that causes us to prioritize perceived threats over other types of stimuli. Although Darwin was a contemporary of Dickens, I’m sure this was a later-developed theory, so one might say Dickens was operating “on instinct” by including towards the end of the novel (taking advantage of “recency bias”).

The end result is that Scrooge is basically scared into an abundance mindset. This could be viewed through economic theory as well, he wants more value from his money. Or sociologically he was doing a sort of potlatch, seeking to inflate his status, being altruistic for purpose of pure gain. That would not have sold many books though.

In order not to be a total pre-transformation Scrooge myself, I am providing some fun definitions of Victorian-era terms that I had to look up:

withal: in addition, besides, or as well. It can also mean despite that, notwithstanding, or nevertheless. 

The Treadmill: The treadmill was a feature in prisons where inmates would walk endlessly, pushing a huge wheel while holding bars at chest height. With every step, the wheel would turn, grinding corn. Prisoners were allowed 12 minutes of break every hour. (Wikipedia)

St. Dunstan: Dickens refers to the harsh weather by comparing it to St. Dunstan using his blacksmith’s tongs to grab the devil by the nose

negus: a hot drink of port, sugar, lemon, and spices such as nutmeg

Cold Boiled: “There are disagreements as to whether it is boiled beef, pork or chicken.” (https://daeandwrite.wordpress.com/tag/a-christmas-carol-menu/)

“Martha dusted the hot plates”:  Cannot find anything on this, my uneducated guess is that plates were warmed by the fire and then were brushed off to remove any ashes

Smoking bishop – A hot drink made from port, red wine, lemons or Seville oranges, sugar, and spices such as cloves. The citrus fruit was roasted to caramelise it and the ingredients then warmed together. A myth persists[citation needed] that the name comes from the shape of the traditional bowl, shaped like a bishop’s mitre, and that in this form, it was served in medieval guildhalls and universities. (Wikipedia)


Barbie: Dolls playing with humans

Posted by on 01/10/2024 Comments Off on Barbie: Dolls playing with humans

After seeing the Gerwig/Bambauch toy epic “Barbie” I was left with the question “Where are the girls who play with the Barbies?”  The only girl character (Ariana Greenblatt) is yet another Hollywood proto-adult, who coolly condemns Barbie as “fascist”.  Aside from the comic opening which pays homage to “2001” the only actual scene of a girl playing with a doll takes place in an adult’s (America Ferrara’s) gauzy flashback scenes.

Barbie is a pink fantasy version of the latest Marvel movie.  Critics seem to be responding to the high concept, the tip of the hat to “camp”, without think going much deeper.  I can see a Barbie franchise in the offing “Barbie XV – Skipper’s Revenge.”

This movie goes beyond action, it addresses social issues, just  not in hearts and minds of girls.  The movie tries to compensate by finishing with Barbie becoming more “human”, but it’s a tacked-on solution.  Barbie is popular because she is not human, and although in real life Mattel offers a Barbie with a wheelchair, and a “Down’s syndrome Barbie”, those don’t sell.

The essential contradiction embodied by Barbie dolls, that they are simultaneously liberating and oppressing, must endure, because it echoes the human condition. Liberating, because Barbie shows girls that they can be anything they want to be.  Oppressing because if Barbie were blown up to human-size, her waist would be so small she would not have enough intestines to digest enough food to survive.    Women face the dilemma of “I want to be like that; I can’t be like that.” 

 Kierkegaard addressed something similar in his concept of “despair”.  

“The self is a synthesis of elements which are, and will always remain in opposition.  These elements are “held together” by the person and involve a tension or an anxiety which is a constant temptation to the person to “let it go”.  This would be a cowardly act, destroying the self in order to escape the anxiety.  The forms of “letting go” are the forms of despair.” (p. 58 Kierkegaard’s Philosophy – Self-Deception and Cowardice in the Present Age, by John Douglas Mullen).

The Barbie movie focuses on “Barbie’s” realization of this opposition.  Problems start to occur when a Barbie designer attempts to avoid Kierkegaardian despair by integrating Barbie’s shadow-side via sketches and darker character ideas.   

Just as Kierkegaard described those most in despair (most in normative fantasy) as seeming “in the pink of health” (pink Barbie), when Jungian undercurrents begin to flow, Barbie unpinks: she gets bad breath and flat feet.

Barbieland is veritable “Lord of the Flies” struggle for gender domination.  At first the Barbie’s rule: they occupy the top echelon of society, without effort.  The Kens are literally accessories.  The Barbies seem to have no problem with this injustice, and a reference is made in voice-over that this is the converse of the “real world”.   

After Barbie’s trip to the “real world” including visiting Mattel headquarters, populated by harmless corporate-suit dolls, Barbie returns to Barbieland only to find it now ruled by Ken dolls.  The Kens have become the oppressors, forcing the Barbie’s into abject supportive roles

Two points are overlooked here.  First, the comic version of hypermasculinity which the Kens embrace dilutes the parallel dilemma that boys now face.  Over time boy’s “action figures” (dolls) have become more and more unrealistically muscular, to the point where they look like steroid-using bodybuilders.  The dilemma of being oneself and meeting an unrealistic ideal is one shared by both genders.  The male box was played for laughs.

Second, female internecine norm enforcement is ignored.  The fact that it’s “impossible to be a woman” is in no way tied to female aspiration to be part of the Barbie crew. If Barbie steps out of line (plays too much) the other Barbies ostracize her as “weird Barbie”, Barbie never nurtures, Barbie never IS nurtured.

I can imagine a more interesting Nietzschean take with hyper-Barbies running amok, openly oppressing any weakness, yet succumbing to the inevitable consequences of Kierkegaardian despair: loss of meaning, identity, self.  Similarly the Ken/G.I. Joe identity-havoc-wreakers would create their own personal Armageddon.  The only hope, in this future and perhaps our own, would be a small girl and a boy who picks up a broken doll, strokes their synthetic hair and tells them it’s going to be OK.

Sketch comedy in the age of Discord

Posted by on 01/05/2022 2 comments

Where do the “Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time Players” go when there is no more prime time?

demon-cake from baking championship contestant vomiting on another cake

Built into the name”Saturday Night Live” is its nature as “appointment tv”. Wickedly subversive in its heyday, the current incarnation seems to have nothing left to subvert. It’s target age-group doesn’t watch tv anymore, they hang out in Twitch virtual rooms, watch 15 second TikTok videos, or log on to Discord servers.

SNL debuted in 1975, when there were only 3 networks and a handful of VHF channels. You want to talk about an “Influencer”? Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show dominated late night t.v. and had a huge role in defining popular culture. Today the late night genre offers us exhausted “Jimmys” in suits, aping the talk show rituals, sets, and sidekicks of their grandparents era. Ratings are way down: there are too many online and cable alternatives, and the guests are too scripted. You will not find the spontaneity of guests who regularly drank and smoked prior to going on air. The Charles Grodins, Robert Blakes, Angie Dickensens….now that was reality t.v.

Thus the SNL parodies of the time didn’t need to squeeze too hard to get the juice. Remember Dan Ackroyd’s impersonation of Tom Snyder, host of the Tomorrow Show? It was considered wildly over-the-top at the time. Compare it to anything the current show’s breakout star, “walking 4th wall” Kate McKinnon does.

If you believe in Truth in Comedy, it’s important that the writers and performers on SNL reflect the lived-experiences of their age cohort. Instead they are writing and acting in sketches that take place in a bygone reality. I sympathize, they have an impossible task, teenagers and young adults today simply barely interact with each other outside of virtual spaces. What you are seeing in SNL is nostalgia performed by people who never made the memories.  

Imagine a skit set in a Thanksgiving scene: probably a bunch of family members arguing, someone has a secret, there’s a weird overly-political uncle, etc. In reality, although a family will be in the same room, anyone under 30 is going to be glued to their phone, in some version of cyberspace.

So how do you make comedy without interaction? SNL hasn’t figured that out – nor has practically anybody – so they resort to barf jokes, poop jokes, and endless clunky impressions.  

I’m not saying that the original SNL didn’t have some of this. But the shock value of a character throwing-up in a sketch is just not the same the 5th decade in.

The closest I’ve seen of someone seeking comedy in the virtual world is Bo Burnham, who’s Netflix special “Inside” is shot in an attic room, with him alone, singing songs about things like chatrooms, Facetime, Jeff Bezos, and Instagram. In the final frames you see him sprawled out on the floor, alone and surrounded by technology. It’s sort of a “Krapps Last Tape” for the internet age. But it’s more wistful than funny.

Bo Burnham: “Inside”

Is comedy in the same predicament? Throughout the ages comedy has relied on elements like misapprehension, mistaken identity, false bravado, exaggeration, absurd physical action, mockery (especially of the powerful by the powerless), and exposed hypocrisy. Virtualization, mediated reality, and the identity curation endemic to social media, inhibit all of these. How can a status difference “land” when we don’t know anyone’s real identity (“on the internet no one knows you are a dog”)? How can an exaggeration retain its power when every TikTok video features grotesque facial affects and speeded-up helium dialog?

Comedy also can’t exist without consequences. Seeing two clowns bop each other over the head with harmless foam baseball bats over and over gets boring very quickly. When consequences are “virtualized”, e.g. the worst that can happen is you lose armor points in an RPG, or you have to create a second account in Twitter, then there’s is nothing to get worked up about, or to laugh about.

Compare this to a historical phenomenon where the stakes cannot have been higher: “Jonkunnu”, a Christmastime holiday in the U.S. during slavery, during which the enslaved would dress up in grotesque costumes and mock their enslavers – I imagine the subtexts of danger and subversion must have made have made a fertile ground for hysterical laughter.

When considering the harms of mediated reality, I remember a comedy improv class where the teacher, in counseling us towards naturalism, stated that the most fascinating thing in the world was an awake young baby. People are naturally drawn in, because every motion and utterance is spontaneous and true. Which is the opposite of mediated reality.

Don’t make a sad face though. There are 3 trends that bode well for comedy:
1. Ever-greater technological privacy invasions: tracking, biometrics, facial recognition, etc. which remove anonymity
2. The inevitable class exploitation that will take place on the internet, of which Jarod Lanier has forewarned, which will create status disparities
3. Emerging general artificial intelligence’s baked-in inflexibility and tyranny

So we will eventually have a return to consequences, status differences, and cyber-overlords to mock. The question is, will the algorithms allow anyone to tell a joke?

Making horror movies less scary

Posted by on 12/05/2018 Comments Off on Making horror movies less scary

 

Backcountry, a horror-survival story about a young couple whose camping trip ends poorly, has opened to good reviews.  Manola Dargis of the NY Times says of the couple: “It’s diverting, unnerving fun watching their descent, at least for a while.”  She couldn’t be more right, although it’s  not just for awhile, it’s for the entire movie, and that is why people go to see horror movies.

Films like this would be genuinely terrifying if you could put truly imagine yourself in the shoes of the main characters, sharing their experience in an unmediated way. This would not be entertainment.  To make the horror palatable, writers and directors let you in on the secret beforehand, tacitly informing you of their awareness of your ambient anxiety.   Movies which stray from this awareness, think Hitchcock here, are rightly seen as more frightening.  Modern “hardcore”horror movies seem to me to rely on the viewers startle-reflex.  The insidious nature of Hitchcock is the intentionality with which he keeps you off-base.  You never expected to be frightened by an ever-increasing flock of birds perching on playground equipment did you?  Why would you?

But in Backcountry, as Dargis points out, you know from the moment the boyfriend refuses a map in the ranger’s office, that ill will befall the couple. In a sense that the couple deserves their misfortune.   When a bear finally attacks, you saw it coming, and at this point are watching to see how graphic the scene will be. It creates a mediocre meta-experience: not experiencing the horror itself (which would be too disturbing),  but instead the experiencing the drama as a correlate of level of DEPICTION of the horror.  How far will the director go? Films like this are considered successful if director goes slightly beyond what the audience expected. But expect it they must.  In filmic language this is done through details like an axe being left too far away to be of use in defense, or by a person accidentally cutting themself before swimming in shark-infested waters.

To me this is a stale pattern, and the solution is to cover subjects which are less inherently horrifying, but cover them in a way that is more realistic.  Less foreshadowing, fewer tropes, more randomness. Loss and lack of control.  The opportunities for this are endless – you could make a horror movie out of an unexpected divorce.   However some incidents, like Timothy Treadwell’s death audiotape in Herzog’s Grizzly Man, are just not for popular entertainment.